12.4 Conclusions

Chapters 5 to 12 presented the seven design concepts for navigation in cyberspace. The concepts have been introduced by giving an overview over the whole range of navigation tools and techniques in large information spaces. Obviously there is neither a single, all-encompassing navigation tool nor one, predominant concept. Rather we have shown a complementing collection of seven concepts and tools that cover different needs of different users with different goals. With the current growth rate of the Internet, the navigation issue will become even more important in the future. We do not yet have the cyberspace envisioned by William Gibson in his science fiction stories [Gib84], that offers direct transparent access to all aspects of knowledge and entertainment of mankind. But, as this part illustrates, there are many promising approaches available today, although on a much smaller scale. However, we still have a far way to go to get final solutions workable in the scale that cyberspace suggests.

Some of the tools presented here demand already structured meta-information as input. This extends from static systems as IGD, where the document author has to create a hierarchically structured document, to knowledge bases such as CYC, where all information is stored as rules and frames. The knowledge bases containing the structured meta-knowledge have been manually constructed. As the contents of the information space grow in scale and dimension, it will become increasingly harder to manually construct tools to navigate and explore this space. This means that the construction of meta-information will have to be supported by the computer to a much larger extent than this is the case today. Techniques based on automatic recognition of structure and contents of the information space will become increasingly important. The concepts introduced here such as similarity, hierarchy, linking, and searching lend itself well to automation. Unfortunately, today's implementations of these systems still need too much human intervention and preprocessing.

In the next chapters we introduce our own Cybertools, namely Hiermap, Navigation Diamond, Viewfinder, and CYBERMAP that address the issues raised in the previous chapters. They provide innovative mechanisms for navigation in cyberspace by giving an automatic overview of an unstructured information space, offering guidance of what to do next, and by putting a single node into a hierarchical context.